Prior to their acquisition by Le Tote, Threadflip was an online marketplace for people to easily swap clothes and accessories. When Threadflip was still a young startup, the company approached us with two UX challenges: find out how women swap clothes offline, then discover what women’s needs were when that experience is transformed into an online setting.
Approach
To help Threadflip better understand their target users, we conducted interviews, online surveys, and field observations by attending and participating in actual clothes swapping events.
We conducted six in-depth interviews and several more informal interviews drawing from several sources ranging from in-person clothing swap attendees to online clothing swappers and sellers.
We also circulated a web survey asking San Francisco women if they had clothes they didn’t wear and how they shopped for or swapped clothing. Nearly all of the 350+ respondents had bought clothes online, and 90% had swapped clothes with friends and family. We asked the respondents to describe an item of clothing they didn’t wear and analyzed their answers for common themes.
Our research findings ultimately helped inform our conceptual designs for the Threadflip website.
Impact
Through our research, we found that effectively translating the clothes shopping and swapping experience from the offline to the online world is the key to Threadflip’s success. In particular, our targeted methodologies helped them drive their new startup to perfectly understand that crucial user experience.
